He seethes, he fumes

While certain people seem to have been pissing themselves with glee since July 7, it has to be said that Dave hasn’t been up in the vanguard. Perhaps he’s got an old tankie’s suspicion of unauthorised enthusiasm.

Instead, he’s been doing a bit of pundit shoplifting. This week’s theme – that the cause of the bombing isn’t in mere events but in a pathological sense of grievance nurtured by Muslims – looks like a straight lift from a Howard Jacobson column in the Independent a few months back. More generally it’s evidence for the proposition that people who can’t handle the facts prefer to take refuge in amateur psychoanalysis, especially when they’re nursing a grievance. And so:

I blame the ideology and the psychology of Grievance — the pleasurable, destructive business of imagining that “they” are being bad to “you”, and of therefore calculating every event on that basis. We call it “nursing” a grudge for a reason. We take this aspect of existence and add to it, almost lovingly.

Now let’s assume that this strange condition does indeed arise in the Muslim mind irrespective of actual events here and in the Middle East or South Asia. These Muslims – a bit twitchy aren’t they. It’s best not to draw attention to anything that might heighten their pathological sense of grievance. If you do, then it follows that you share responsibility for anything nasty that follows once the little brown people get all overexcited.

Yes, once again, it’s Iraq, Aaro’s own pet grievance. He just can’t leave it alone. His response to carnage is to search for a way to discredit opponents of his own position on that issue and to imply that they have some indirect responsibility for terrorism. This is the meaning he puts to an atrocity. It’s a means to embarrass those who disagree with him into shutting up.

It simply is not an accident — in psychological terms — that anything that conflicts with the Grievance is discounted, and anything that contributes to it is emphasised.